Conventional histories of Scottish literature have for over a century resembled their British and Irish counterparts in their strongly masculinist orientation. Particularly when the subject is the later eighteenth and the earlier nineteenth centuries, the period usually dubbbed the Romantic, the relative exclusion of women is singular in light of their considerable literary activity. There are of course many reasons for the modern marginalization of Scottish women poets of the Romantic period, not the least of which is the extraordinary prominence of Robert Burns and Walter Scott in Scotland's literary landscape during the era. Nevertheless, to speak of Scottish Romantic poetry wholly — or nearly so — in terms of these two male poets misrepresents the facts no less than historically happened with England when what was regarded as English Romantic poetry was defined almost entirely in terms of the work of a canonical "Big Five": William Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, and Keats. The very fact that in most literary histories (including even very recent ones) the names of Wordsworth and Shelley appear as surnames only, without regard for the substantial literary production of another Wordsworth (Dorothy) and another Shelley (Mary), speaks volumes about the tacit exclusion of women writers that characterized Anglophone literary history for well over a century. Indeed, until very recent years serious discussion of women poets was more likely to be found in studies dating from the nineteenth century than in those from the twentieth. Masculinization of the literary canon(s), it seems, went largely hand in hand with the critical and historical activities that attended literary studies in the early years of the twentieth century, when the aesthetic codes and expectations historically associated with New Criticism and other formalist approaches took hold within the male-dominated academic circles in which the self-appointed arbiters of taste and culture held forth.

Early twentieth-century literary historians at first merely minimized the poetry of Romantic women poets — not to mention that of male poets outside the "Big Five." Observing its failure to conform fully and satisfactorily to the intellectual and aesthetic program defined for them in England by Wordsworth, Byron, and company, they deemed that "failure" to be failure in its other, wholly pejorative sense. Routinely relegating such poetry to secondary status at best at the dawn of the Information Age, they pursued a policy of streamlining and simplification of literary history from which would emerge a narrowly stereotypical — and significantly inaccurate — sketch that would come finally to be characterized as "the Romantic ideology."1. The phrase is most notably that of Jerome J. McGann, whose important 1983 study (McGann) was one of the earliest calls for a reassessment not just of what we understand by the term "Romantic," but also of the nature and assumptions of the literary-critical activities by which scholars and others have attempted to understand the literature usually gathered — selectively — under the umbrella term, "Romantic." Even now, the definite article ("the") implies a monolithic construct that implicitly resists and excludes consideration of alterity — of "otherness" — and of diversity. Increasingly accustomed to the more "manageable" but artificially narrowed group of writers represented within this streamlined, mainstreamed, and profoundly male (and masculinist) definition of Romantic poetry, literary historians, scholars, and the students they trained first passed over and then simply forgot this large and diverse body of poetry, which consequently fell into ever greater obscurity. Read less and less frequently, and typically dismissed as inferior when it was, it gradually disappeared from view.

In a postmodern age preoccupied with the cult of the Victim and with victimology generally, it is easy (although incorrect) to attribute this unfortunate history simply and exclusively to deliberate and malicious design by a coterie of misogynist male critics, twentieth-century and nineteenth-century alike. True, women's marginalization and subsequent exclusion owed much to a historical prejudice against women's efforts (and successes) in the public forum, whether in politics, education, or the arts. Richard Polwhele's 1798 The Unsex'd Females is a particularly notorious — though not atypical — example of a pointedly gendered attack upon the (often effective) attempts of women writers to enter the public discourse on social, political, and economic topics traditionally reserved for men; William Gifford's Baeviad of the previous year offers another instance of this sort of attack. The public antipathy to the lives and works of Mary Wollstonecraft and followers like Mary Hays is another. Nor was this bias uncommon among the period's professional reviewers, whose responses tended to take two distinctive tacks — when they did not ignore women's writing entirely. The first is like Polwhele's or Gifford's knee-jerk resistance, and takes the form of often withering reviews that not only castigate the writing itself on ostensibly objective critical terms but also engage in deliberate misrepresentation and defamation of the authors' characters. The other tack, milder in manner but no less pernicious in effect, is visible in the many sugar-coated reviews that praise an author most pointedly and effusively for those aspects of her work that most characterize the model of the subservient, sentimental, chaste and domestic woman who posed no threat to the status quo but instead affirmed it. Occupying the ostensibly objective and therefore superior ground of the professional critic, the reviewer — and the scholar-teacher who translated his activities into the academic classroom and the professional journal — dismissed those works that deviated from the elitist, masculinist aesthetic and ideology for which he spoke. Overwhelmingly, these works were by women and-or working-class writers; frequently they were both, and their exclusion exposes the ingrained sexism and classism of much of traditional literary history and criticism.

At the same time, however, it is also reasonable — although less politically attractive — to attribute Romantic literary women's marginalization at least partly to a related phenomenon: to modernity's curious obsession with simplification, reduction, and compartmentalization, not just of knowledge or art, but of human enterprise of whatever sort. Put simply, as the professional study of literature came ever more to reside within academic institutions, and in often elite and male-dominated post-secondary ones (colleges and universities) especially, it seemed to many that its range and scope had to be reduced ever more in order to accommodate that study to the time and space limits imposed by academic terms of study: by academic years, semesters, quarters, and so on. By the last third of the twentieth century, a "Romantic poetry" that encompassed not merely a "Big Five" (or Six, including Blake) but also even so few as half a dozen other prolific contemporaries often proved too unwieldy for scholars, teachers, and students alike in an age of diminishing time, resources, and attention spans. The male-oriented cultural establishment that had generated a literary canon — and for the Romantic period a nearly exclusively male one — in the first place proceeded from a set of a priori cultural assumptions that privileged male authorship and male readership. When something had to be eliminated for the sake of exigency, what went was, of course, what that establishment regarded as the least important, the least necessary, to its own interests. Not surprisingly, this was the writing — and thus the literary voices — of women.

When we come to the poetry of Scotland — as is the case also with that of Ireland — the powerful realities of political and cultural history intersect with those of literary history. For while the literary history of England can be sketched in relatively straightforward lines in terms of a dominant national culture, that of Scotland (and of Ireland, and to some extent also of Wales) must accommodate the consequences of the shifting relative minority status of its writers and citizens. The Act of Union that brought Scotland and Wales together with England in 1707 under the political umbrella of an ostensibly "United" Kingdom could go only so far to engineer anything like the genuine cultural melding that is implied by the nationalist title of Britain (and Britons). Indeed, recent initiatives in Scotland to reclaim full national political independence illustrate how fierce and ultimately ineradicable is the resistance to such political and cultural forced marriages, which are never egalitarian and companionate but instead unsteady, artificial arrangements in which violence, abuse, and rape play no small part, as the record of Britain's experience in Ireland has amply and tragically demonstrated.

By the Romantic period the Act of Union had been in place for three quarters of a century. Following the failure of the Jacobite rising of 1745 Scotland steered a steady course toward ever greater enfranchisement within Britain, to whose now combined culture Scottish intellectual, economic, and moral traditions contributed in increasingly significant ways. Many Scots saw in that larger national unit, in fact, great practical opportunities for personal advancement that made them less interested in clinging to sentimental ideas about Celtic origins and the desirability of absolute Scottish separatism. Indeed, especially by the latter quarter of the eighteenth century, as Linda Colley has written in Britons, "Scots . . . do not seem to have regarded themselves as stooges of English cultural hegemony. Far from succumbing helplessly to an alien identity imposed by others, in moving south they helped construct what being British was all about" (125). In Scotland, the literary culture reflected this political shift toward assimilation and participation in part in its greater emphasis on a formal Anglophone literature that reflected, on one hand, the dominant intellectual culture of aristocratic England and its literary heritage and, on the other, the intellectual heritage of the Scottish Enlightenment. It is not by accident that while there has long been something known as a "Scottish Enlightenment," the existence of a comparable and contemporaneous English Enlightenment has only recently been argued in compelling fashion (Porter). Scotland had for centuries, after all, been one of the world's great intellectual centers, and one immediate consequence had been a vigorous and diverse publishing industry. Moreover, for all their traditional sense of cultural difference, many Scots shared with their English compatriots an overarching anxiety about the threat posed to them all by "outside" forces, most notably France. Especially with the coming of the French Revolution, sentiment swung sharply in favor of unified "British" solidarity in the face of this clearly mortal danger. Scottish interests in politics, economics, science, and the arts, it became clear, were likely to be served best by a stronger union with England, and as Scots rose to ever greater prominence (and influence) within the national Establishment much of Scottish literature began to manifest signs both of "loyalist" sentiment and of a clearly "British" nationalism. Too often in traditional literary history the "mainstream" culture tends to be de-emphasized precisely because of its inherent conservatism and its adherence to what succeeding generations typically regard as politically incorrect (or at least unattractive) and reactionary principles. Yet this conservative ground is often that which is occupied by the majority, including the writers. The texts contained in the present archive reflect this strain of sentiment no less than they do the more politically and socially radical, and their presence here therefore helps to paint a more accurate picture of the cultural milieu of the Romantic period in Scotland.

At the same time, though, there remained powerful elements in Scottish culture — including its literature — that resisted assimilation precisely because of an entirely reasonable fear that in becoming "British," Scots would lose irretrievably what they considered to be their essential Scottishness. For many Scots, such thinking informed a proud — even defiant — recognition and celebration of Scotland's profoundly Celtic national origin. For them, the passion for both political and cultural independence implicit in this celebration was not to be snuffed out, even when it might at times be tempered for purposes of exigency. The omnipresence in Scottish thinking of the history of William Wallace, for example, whose death at the hands of the treacherous Scottish nobles elevated him to the status of mythic hero, was merely the most dramatic manifestation of how such beliefs persisted. Indeed, as Kirsteen McCue has written, when by the 1790s the physical threat posed by the Jacobites had all but vanished, "Jacobitism became the strongest outlet for Scottish national feeling" (64), an outlet that was especially apparent in the poetry and music of the period. Recent post-colonial theory has helped us to appreciate how a subaltern individual or people may subvert or repudiate its oppression not only by overt violent resistance but also — often more tellingly — through more subtle means of enculturation.6. See, for instance, Bhabha. That is, the oppressive power and authority of an alien presence (which may be an actual invader or occupier or, alternatively, a social, cultural, or ideological force) may be effectively countered at the level of everyday experience by the perpetuation among the oppressed or occupied subalterns of an indigenous cultural behavior that the occupying culture seeks to repress, overwrite, or extirpate entirely. In the case of Scottish literature, this indigenous culture is most clearly apparent in the vernacular, idiomatic tradition, as well as in the wholly Gaelic corpus, but it informs a large portion of the Anglophone literature as well.

Its overt linguistic differance marks Scottish vernacular poetry as undeniably different from the formal idiom of the mainstream Anglo-Scots literary culture, even when it does not presume to stand entirely outside it. As Agnes Mure Mackenzie observes, "alongside the courtly, highly literate and often only too literary verse there runs a voluminous stream of ‘folk’ literature, of uncommon force and vigour for the most part, and some of it of extraordinary beauty" (33-34). Central to this vernacular tradition, of course, are distinctively Scottish tales, legends, myths, and characters, as well as familiar historical episodes, all of which call attention to their essential Scottishness not just through their content but also through their form, including the language in which they are cast. To this tradition belong earlier poets like Allan Ramsey (1686-1758) and especially Robert Fergusson (1750-74), whose unnaturally short life deprived Scottish literature of the eighteenth century's most proficient vernacular male poet, an Edinburgh poet equally at home in city and countryside, and blessed with a remarkable ear for poetic language. It was, of course, Robert Burns (1759-96) who brought the vernacular tradition to its greatest prominence, despite the very considerable productivity and public reputation of numerous women poets of the period who also composed in the vernacular. At the same time, though, many Scottish poets wrote with equal facility in both idioms, as did Burns, and Scott after him, basing their selection of idiom on their intended audiences and in the process further underscoring this literary indicator of national cultural difference.

Eighteenth-century Anglo-Scots poetry frequently reflects the cultural ambivalence — indeed frequently a suspiciousness of displacement verging on xenophobia — of many Scots, who often feared (not without reason) that their cultural identity stood at risk of being swallowed up by a cosmopolitanism they viewed with some alarm, even though Scotland (and especially Edinburgh) had long enjoyed a reputation as a European rather than merely a "British" cultural center. Evidence of this cultural unease is visible in the experience of many of the Scots who migrated south to London in the eighteenth century only to find themselves in the uncomfortable position of outsiders, even when they sought deliberately to assimilate with the English culture. As A. M. Oliver remarks, for instance, "their speech was not English, but it was close enough to it to irritate rather than to endear" (120). The explanation, at least to the essayist for The Monthly Magazine for 1797, appeared simple enough: "the chief defect in the Scottish literature of this period was, that the Scots had in general ceased to write their own peculiar dialect, of which they were now ashamed, but had not yet learned to write genuine idiomatic English" ("Account" 358). Never noted themselves for their great toleration of cultural difference, the English denigrated and ostracized these would-be mainstream Augustans from the north, making them acutely self-conscious of the extent to which their hybrid Anglophone idiom was no longer wholly Scottish nor yet entirely English. Indeed, the cultural self-consciousness visible in much Scottish literature of the period may stem from what was widely regarded as an inherent competition between London and Edinburgh, the latter of which functioned after the Act of Union as both a national capital and a provincial cultural center, a point that bore clear significance to an emerging Scottish nationalism that was itself an inevitable consequence of the Act of Union.7. See also Landry, especially Chapter 6: "Other others: the marginality of cultural difference."

In order to counteract the hostile and often resentful English attitudes and prejudices that confronted them, transplanted Scots in the south stuck together in loosely-connected enclaves, whether their occupations were commercial, economic, military, intellectual, or literary. And because they were skilled at their occupations, they tended to thrive despite the obstacles that came with this hostile environment, prospering in part because of their sheer hard work. As the same 1797 essayist put it with a flourish of hyperbole:

the Scots began to apply themselves to almost every branch of literature and science, with an ardour and a success which were to awaken a new emulation in their neighbours of England, and to make the Scottish rank with the Grecian, the Roman, the Italian, and the Gallic names, in the estimation of all the votaries of either profound or elegant learning. ("Account" 358) By the end of the century, there were sufficiently large numbers of well educated, well placed Scots within the British social, political, and intellectual infrastructure to ease the transition and advancement there of increasing numbers of their countrymen, an increasingly sore point among the English natives who found themselves threatened or actually displaced in the emerging meritocracy.

Paradoxically, the Act of Union that had "invented" a new national identity under the banner of "Britain" promoted a rhetoric that served the interests of those who advocated Scottish nationalism while at the same time it aided those who sought to join the mainstream English culture, for, as Colley notes, the most successful transplants were able to "reconcile their Scottish past with their English present by the expedient of regarding themselves as British" (125) This process of cultural acclimation and accommodation was reflected also in literature, where it seemed to many that Scottish poetry was moving away from the vernacular tradition and toward something ostensibly more "respectable" and "polite" — that is, something that resembled the sanctioned models of the putative dominant culture. By the time that the first Book of James Beattie's most famous poem, The Minstrel; or, The Progress of Genius, appeared in 1771, for instance, Scots poets were becoming more comfortable with the mainstream English idiom and poetic forms — and even experimenting with them — and were in the process abandoning the intellectual conservatism of didactic poetry for something new that would reach its first great flowering in the poetry of Walter Scott (1771-1832), which burst upon the scene in 1802 with the first edition of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and established itself firmly in 1805 with The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Here was a poetry that was decidedly "romantic" in nature: powerful, original writing that delighted in tale-telling, in superstition and legend, and in a finely detailed sense of name, place, and time, a poetry in which a rich texture of the exotic is generated both through the geographically and culturally specific names of characters, settings, and incidents, and through the comparative "wildness" of the narratives themselves.

Is there, then, a distinctively "Scottish" poetry to be discerned in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries? Certainly the vernacular tradition suggests one such poetry, especially when one goes beyond the surface level of the idiomatic language and into the distinct cultural heritage reflected in the poetry itself. Offering unfortunately impressionistic terminology in support of his thesis, L. M. Watt argued in 1912 that Scottish literature in general is characterized by five distinctive features: romanticism, patriotism, love, humor, and nature. These "telling and original chords" he attributes in various combination to Scots poets generally, noting that "great passions and pathos have welled out from all of them at sundry times and in divers manners" (18-19). Watt's formulation is in fact more helpful than its apparent fuzziness makes it seem at first to be. By "romanticism," for instance, he means the romance tradition, which extends back to Scotland's earliest Gaelic roots and which provides an important thread of cultural continuity in the form of a sort of "national tale." Running parallel is what Watt calls "patriotism" and what we may perhaps better understand to be that fierce Scottish nationalism that drives historical romances and lyric verse alike. This is that essential quality of "Scottishness" that suffuses literary works situated in unmistakably Scottish physical, psychological, ideological, and intellectual settings, reminding us at every point of their grounding in a specifically Scottish time, place, and culture; it is, in fact, characteristic of Scott's best known work, which is on the whole deeply patriotic without being merely jingoistic.

"Love" appears for Watt to involve not only the interpersonal romantic attachment one normally associates with the term but also filial bonding, a working-out at the level of the family and the community of the passionate attachment that figures also in one's relation to her or his Scottish national identity (again Scott provides a useful illustration of how this element permeates poems — and of course prose fiction — ostensibly devoted to other subjects altogether). "Nature," by extension, likewise involves the sense of a distinctively Scottish place, landscape, or setting (including internal setting), and of an equally distinctive and powerful relationship to that setting, that is fundamental to any specifically national cultural definition of literary works. "Humor," of course, takes many forms, from meticulous intellectual satire to broad physical comedy, and it operates at linguistic, intellectual, and dramatic levels. Moreover, it involves in this context an element of "inside-ness" particularly characteristic of Scottish (and Irish) humor, by which we are made to understand that both the Scottish characters in the literature and that literature's readers somehow know more than do the cultural "outsiders" (including outsider readers) who appear naive, innocent, and vulnerable to all manner of pranks and deceptions, both within the plots and at the level of the language itself. This latter feature, again, is characteristic of subaltern groups who are enabled through precisely these subversive varieties of humor to regain a measure of superiority over those who have overcome or oppressed them in other ways. Benedict Anderson has defined "nation" loosely but usefully as "an imagined political community" (x). It is in precisely this fashion that Scottish nationalism defines the nation in the aftermath of the Act of Union, and in which the literature (and other artifacts of culture from the most esoteric to the least) promotes a subversive, oppositional stance by advertising both overtly and covertly its differences from "Englishness."

Added to these distinguishing qualities would have to be also lyricism, which enriches both the Anglo-Scots and the vernacular poetic traditions. Burns, Scott, and James Hogg (1770-1835) were of course superlative lyricists, whether they adopted the sentimental mode or a more vigorous — even contentious — one, and in Anglo-Scots and vernacular forms alike. But so, too were Anne Hunter (whose lyrics were, remember, set to music by Franz Joseph Haydn) and, in a very different vein indeed, Isobel Pagan. This element of lyricism figures significantly also in the ballads of women poets. Dorothea Primrose Campbell (1794-1863) and the blind Christian Gray (b. 1772), for instance, both produced moving ballads on the subject of war's devastation upon families, while the songs of Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne, were famous and widely admired even before their author's identity was known.8. She wrote nearly a hundred songs based on traditional Scottish airs, publishing them under the pseudonym of "Mrs. Bogan of Bogan." Only after her death in 1845 was her identity revealed when her posthumous Lays from Strathearn was published in 1846.

A historical overview of Scottish women's writing reveals the validity of a point made recently by Dorothy McMillan about the remarkable engagement with issues both "public" and "domestic" to be found in the work of Scottish women writers (including prose writers): . . . the balance of interest between the public and private spheres is peculiarly female. Women almost always take an interest, even if not a part, in public life and they write about that interest, while at the same time they are almost always

committed to creating stable environments in which the public figures may relax and develop more complete senses of self: women provide the fabric of social cohesion. (xiv) Perhaps because of the roles historically assigned them by a gendered culture, women writers exhibit in their works a particular sensitivity to the relationship between the public and the private, the socio-political and the personal. Because so much of their experience historically depended on the stability and viability of the domestic sphere — on a "family" life, variously defined — women were placed in far greater jeopardy by real and even potential threats to that domestic unit, as happened most commonly during the era in the case of war, which led to the decimation of countless eighteenth- and nineteenth-century families when their male breadwinners were killed or incapacitated and the family units consequently impoverished or utterly destroyed.9. On this theme in British women's writing during the Romantic period, see also Behrendt. Behrendt — Intro, p. 35 Of such histories of domestic tragedy Scottish literature — like that of Britain generally — provides numerous examples.

For all the progress that was made in the eighteenth century (on both sides of the border) toward a united and assimilated nationhood, the history of Anglo-Scottish relations in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries nevertheless furnishes numerous instances of disruption and devastation that are made even more poignant by the fact of their being played out within the nation itself, rather than as part of an international conflict like that with France or the American colonies. Mistrust, hostility, and outright violence had played a part in English-Scottish relations for centuries, and the eighteenth-century Jacobite risings and the recurrent English fears of invasion, like the characteristic contemptuous and violent treatment of Scots by English, served for many on both sides to exacerbate rather than to repair these sore relations. English resentment of the Highlanders' march on Derby in 1745, for instance, was matched by Scottish outrage over the apparently genocidal aftermath of the Battle of Culloden in 1746. These political and cultural disruptions — and the tensions that underlie them — are played out as well within literature, a point that Donna Landry makes in connection with "the Scotch milkmaid," Janet Little, when she observes that in her texts "the cultural specificity of English imperialism is articulated with and against an emergent Scottish nationalism." A working-class poet herself, Little, Landry argues, draws in her work upon "the critical power of the socially marginal, who remain exorbitant to established literary conventions, but within the discourse of Romanticism will become increasingly conventionalized figures of more or less explicit social protest" (236-37). In Little's poetry — and in that of many of her female contemporaries on both sides of the border — the woman, the woman writer's voice, and the woman writer's poetry functions both as signified and as signifier: as "text" and as sign. Their poems, like their lives, become sites for enacting struggles that are being conducted also on the broader stage of culture as a whole. At the ground level of language, we need to appreciate, whether a poet elects to write in Scottish vernacular or standardized formal English is unavoidably an act at once aesthetic and political, no less so than is the choice of subject matter or ideological orientation. One is either working within a tradition or outside it, with or against what it represents and embodies.

The ongoing cultural ambivalences generated by the intra-national tensions of the eighteenth century feed the characteristic hard edge of Scottish poetry — including women's — of a literature that exhibits impulses that are at once assimilationist and oppositional, a literature that copes with the appearance of cultural nationhood as a United Kingdom without neglecting the glories and the grievances of an independent Scotland that refuses to be erased and assimilated. In many ways, this situation epitomizes that in which women have found themselves over the centuries as a dominant cultural and ideological establishment has pressed them to submerge their independence, their voices, their names, their selves to the persons and the interests of others. This is one reason why Scottish literature of the Romantic period, like women's literature generally and Scottish women's writing of that period in particular, so often discloses a powerfully subversive and oppositional character.

This electronic archive of poetry by women of the Romantic period undertakes to rectify the critical and cultural lacunae involving these poets by making available in electronic format a large collection of volumes of their poetry reproduced in their entirety rather than merely extracted. This archive affords an extensive view of women's poetry of the period. Not absolutely exhaustive, this archive nevertheless is both representative and characteristic. It includes authors — like Joanna Baillie, Anne Bannerman, and Anne Macvicar Grant — whose importance is no longer in dispute, and it re-introduces to a twenty-first-century readership authors whose names and works have been neglected or marginalized for the better part of two centuries or more. Among these latter are Anne Ross, Catherine Ward, and Christian Gray ("blind from her infancy"), who published more than one collection, as well as Janet Little ("the Scotch Milkmaid"), Susannah Hawkins, and Isobel Pagan, who are known to have published only a single volume. The editors' aim has been not to construct any sort of hierarchy of women poets or to establish any particular "screening mechanism" or editorial filter for the contemporary reader other than to provide complete texts of the various volumes and in the process let the words and the numbers make their own argument.

About the actual numbers of readers these poets enjoyed in their time it is of course difficult to speak with certainty in many instances. Even when volumes published by subscription permit us to count the number of subscribers, there is no guarantee that those subscribers actually read what they purchased. Often a subscription was largely an act of charity that bought the gratification of public acknowledgment for one's support of writers who might well be talented but who might equally well be merely indigent or afflicted. Some undeniable facts of publishing history do at least offer us some tentative guidance about readerships. Poets like Grant, for example, not only published multiple collections but also witnessed some of those volumes go through subsequent — sometimes altered and enlarged — editions. This suggests that their readerships were comparably extensive, a fact that is reflected too in the number of references (positive and negative) to their poetry in the works of their contemporaries, including the popular and literary press. Others published once and then disappeared from view.

In recovering the texts contained in this archive, the editors have attempted to provide materials for the ongoing reassessment of the Romantic literary landscape. This reassessment will require some considerable rethinking of the relation of Scottish women poets not only to their male contemporaries in Scotland but also to their contemporaries of both sexes in the British Isles and on the Continent, as well as to their sometimes surprisingly large audiences in America. The only criterion for inclusion in this initial edition of the electronic archive has had to do with genre. Specifically, the editors have excluded for the present poetry that is explicitly dramatic in form, in part for reasons having to do with the electronic encoding of the texts. The volumes contained here therefore represent principally lyric and discursive verse of the period, including narratives, ballads, scriptural paraphrases, and hymnology. The period is itself defined broadly rather than narrowly, in keeping with the general tendency of contemporary scholarship both on Romanticism generally and on women writers of the Romantic period specifically. The editors have adopted as general historical parameters for their selection of texts the dates offered by J. R. de J. Jackson's groundbreaking Romantic Poetry by Women: A Bibliography, 1770-1835. These dates, or something very like them, have been widely adopted in the past decade by scholars (including anthologizers) and teachers to define a Romantic "period" in the British Isles, and in adopting them — however loosely — for this project the editors have aimed for consistency without sacrificing what is most distinct and distinguishing about the specifically Scottish poetry represented here.

Dates are notoriously misleading, however, and prone to an unfortunate systematizing that has led to academic fallacies like periodicity and canonicity that have justifiably come under fire in recent years both for their inadequacy and for their arbitrariness. Moreover, any convenient dating of British "Romanticism" runs afoul of certain biographical realities involved with both its traditional luminaries and its lesser known participants. Older paradigms of British Romanticism often posited a shorter period: from Blake's earliest publications around 1790, the emergence of Coleridge in the mid 1790s, and the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, until about the death in 1834 of Coleridge, who had survived the major male poets of the so-called "second generation" and who was himself survived until 1850 by William Wordsworth. But when one includes also the women poets (as well as the many men equally badly accommodated by that dating), these dates become wholly problematic. Many of the women were born earlier and were publishing earlier, in England and Scotland alike: Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), Mary Robinson (1758-1800), and Helen Maria Williams (1762-1827), for example, were actively publishing early in the 1780s. Likewise, many women associated with Romanticism continued to publish well into the 1840s. Moreover, it has become increasingly clear in recent years that while an identifiable Romantic ethos survives virtually until mid-century, the seeds of a demonstrably "Victorian" ideology, aesthetic, and cultural mindset had already been planted in Great Britain even before Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815.

The editors have attempted to be inclusive rather than exclusive in their selection of authors to include. To the work of poets who were born in Scotland or who lived substantial portions of their lives there, therefore, is added that of Susanna Blamire (1747-1794). Blamire was born south of the border in Cumberland, near Carlisle, but wrote many songs in the Scottish dialect and set many tales (like "Stoklewath," arguably her finest poem) in the border counties; her poems, collected and edited half a century after her death, were published in Edinburgh (Blamire). At the same time, the editors have chosen not to include, for example, Janet Hamilton (1795-1873), since before the birth of her third child she composed fewer than twenty poems (all orally and dictated to an amanuensis, and all on narrowly religious subjects), electing to resume writing poetry only in 1854, which thus places the bulk of her work outside this archive's working parameters. Such editorial decisions notwithstanding, this archive contains the bulk of Scots women's poetry from the Romantic period, a body of work whose extent, variety, and vigor provide a rich field for the exploration of the readers, scholars, and teachers who will continue this work of recovery and reassessment.